Television Genres

Few trends have had as much impact on television as formats have in recent years. Long confined to the fringes of the TV industry, they have risen to prominence since the late 1990s. Today, they are a global business with hundreds of programmes adapted across the world at any one time, from mundane game shows to blockbuster talent competitions, from factual entertainment to high-end drama.

Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. ...

For decades, television scholars have viewed global television through the lens of cultural imperialism, focusing primarily on programs produced by US and UK markets and exported to foreign markets. Global Television Formats revolutionizes television studies by de-provincializing its approach to media globalization.

Genre is central to understanding the industrial context and the visual form of television. This new edition brings together leading international scholars to provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the debates, issues and concerns of television genre. The Television Genre Book is structured in eleven sections which introduce the concept of genre itself and how it has been understood in television studies, and then address in turn key televisual genres.

Thinking Outside the Box brings together some of the best and most challenging scholarship about TV genres, exploring their genesis, their functions and development, and the interaction of disparate genres. The contributors argue that genre is a significant process rather than a static category. In addition to considering traditional genres such as sitcoms, soap operas, and talk shows, the authors explore new hybrids, including reality programs, teen-oriented science fiction, and quality dramas, and examine how many of these shows have taken on a global reach. ...

A number of “thought-pieces” have recently come out proclaiming with glee that genre, as we know it, is dead; that it has been put out of its misery by algorithmic recommendations, search engines, and a rapidly transforming entertainment industry (de Pontent 2022; Battan 2019; Cooperman 2021; Leneghan 2020; Petrusich 2021). They present genre as the hard barriers that make entertainment boring and suggest that there is a utopian potential in breaking them down. ...

While journalists, cultural critics, technology writers, and industry figures have been writing about television for a surprisingly long time (going back at least to experiments with mechanical television in the late 1920s), the academic study of television history largely emerged only in the 1970s in the United States and the United Kingdom.